Friday, October 16, 2009

10/16/09

Thousand Word Status Update

This morning I dropped Sherri off at work and came back home. I pulled up to the bridge intersection to the aftermath of a major car crash. One car had been thrown up onto the lawn of a house, a pick-up bent across the southbound lanes and another still sat there in the intersection. Glass, debris, pieces of car everywhere. It had to have happened minutes before I pulled up and maybe minutes after Sherri and I had been in that same intersection- it doesn't take me long to drop her off and get back to the house. Really kind of freaky.

I flashed back to the other car crash (besides my own) stuck in my mind. Years ago I was in Chicago with Art and Matt having just seen a movie (Ran or Last Temptation of Christ, I don't remember which). We came down a hill and saw a car in an intersection completely flipped over. It was still slowly spinning. I think that's what I remember...I mean how much of that have I embellished in my memory now? Some things I have crystal clarity about-- mostly stupid things I did and said years ago that come back to me suddenly and make me groan. I know that those have veracity, an exactness of detail I can't avoid. But things like these seen-at-a-distance stories. I mean I tell a lot of stories and run a lot of games, so how much do I reweave those in my own head.

To quote from an email I sent my players- I've been down with some unexplained pain since last Thursday-- forcing me to two games last weekend, miss Kenny's session, skip a special board game event, and pass on my niece's birthday party. Not that I'm bitter. Anyway, I saw the doctor this week and the first round of tests didn't show anything. He's got me on Prilosec and we'll see if things calm down, if not, there's a bonus round next week of more invasive procedures (yit-yeh...?). So yes-- old guy walking.

Things I've watched or read recently that struck me: I still like Castle on ABC but it becomes clearer each episode that I only watch it for Nathan Fillion. I gave up on Dollhouse after seeing the unaired episode on DVD- an episode which pretty much presented closure to the entire arc. I don't need to see any more. Will tells me Season Two has started out pretty weak. Been following Community on NBC and while I like it, I don't think the show yet knows what it wants to be. Anime-wise I finally watched all of Ergo Proxy. Anime falls into one of two categories for me: OK or WTF? This fell lightly into the latter group. That must be what it is like for my players when I spin an overly complicated story and they just go along for the ride. Read the third volume of Absolute Sandman (before handing it off to my niece for her birthday). There's some amusing undercutting of his own ethos that Gaiman pulls off there--making fun of the poseur nature of things. It is done lightly, not like the kick in the teeth FU of Neon Genesis Evangelion where the writer seems to be taking revenge on the viewers. Read and saw some other things, but nothing that sticks with me right this second.

Trying to hunt down a copy of Castle Falkenstein the rpg. We had a couple of copies before the fire. That's another one of those games I had on my list to run years ago and never go around to doing so. It is interesting that it came at the start of what would eventually be a real fascination with Steampunk. But I don't want to go one too far as I'm writing someone up to accompany that article I did on Cyberpunk rpgs and literary genres.

I love police procedural mysteries, but more and more I can't stand watching them. Netflix has a bunch of them available for on demand viewing (Numbers, Wire in the Blood, CSI, and so on) but there's something off-putting to me about most of them. The British ones appear to have more sophistication and depth, but I think that's kind of an illusion. Mind you I may be a little jaded since I just got done finally catching up on The Wire.

Four campaigns going on-- I had to bump two of them last week. Planning on running the other two this weekend. Libri Vidicos continues on well. I tried a narrative trick with memory loss and flashbacks that has worked pretty well and broke up the usual structure of the game. We had a nice puzzle session last time. I always happy when players are stumped for a little bit and then work out a solution, especially one which taxes their resources. The last Wushu game went pretty well. I still have to do some tweaks on the combat system, possibly turn sequencing, and definitely need to give the warrior archetype some additional options. I also have to write up the last several session reports for the game. Changeling continues to go pretty well, although that was one that got bumped. The Third Continent game works in great part based on really good play and character banter as much as anything, and I'm enjoying that. L5R continues to pull at me and I think I want to sit down to figure out how one would adapt that to HeroQuest 2e- if nothing else I really want to try that system out.

Played a few new boardgames, but nothing that really grabbed me. I'm got a couple of larger “monster” games that I really want to get a chance to play but they'll take some hours on everyone's part. There's a new local BG group so I'm hoping to go to their next meeting. That's in Goshen, so it means a half-hour drive.